On This Day in HISTORY

681 – Erwig, newly-crowned King of the Visigoths, opens the 12th Council of Toledo; confirms metropolitan archbishop of Toledo will consecrate all bishops appointed by the king including those outside his province, giving primacy to Toledo’s diocese; 28 anti-Semitic measures enacted

King Erwig at the Council of Toledo

1349 – 600 Jews in Basel Switzerland, believed by Catholics to be causing the ongoing Black Death, are rounded up and shackled inside a wooden barn, and burned to death – a few young orphans are allowed to live but forcibly converted to Catholicism, and Jews are banned from settling in Basil

1431 – Judges’ investigations for the trial of Joan of Arc begin in Rouen, France, the seat of the English occupation government

1859 – Carrie Chapman Catt, American women’s rights activist; first woman school superintendent in Mason County Iowa (1885); first female reporter in San Francisco (1887); president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1900-1904 and 1915-1920); campaigned for the 19th Amendment, which gave U.S. women the right to vote; founder of the League of Women Voters and International Alliance of Women

1861 – Mississippi becomes the second state to secede from the Union before the outbreak of the American Civil War

1901 – Chic Young born, American cartoonist, comic strip Blondie

1908 – Simone de Beauvoir, French existentialist philosopher, social theorist, author and feminist; her treatise, The Second Sex, is a foundational tract of contemporary feminism; co-editor with Jean-Paul Sartre of the political journal, Les Temps moderns; also noted for novels, She Came to Stay,The Mandarins and The Blood of Others

1909 – Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, plants the British flag 97 nautical miles (180 km; 112 mi) from the South Pole, the farthest anyone had reached to that time

1915 – Gandhi’s return to India, arriving in Bombay from South Africa (see also 2003 entry)

1916 – Vic Mizzy born, American TV and film composer, The Addams Family

1923 – Juan de la Cierva makes the first autogyro flight

1940 – Ruth Dreifuss born, Swiss Social Democratic politician; first woman President of the Swiss Confederation (1999), and previously: Secretary of the Swiss Trade Union (1982-1993); Canton of Geneva representative to the Swiss Federal Council (1993-2002), the second woman and first person of Jewish heritage elected to the council;

1962 – Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” is released

1987 – The White House releases a memorandum prepared for President Ronald Reagan in January 1986 which shows a definite link between U.S. arms sales to Iran and the release of American hostages in Lebanon

1991 – Representatives from the U.S. and Iraq meet at the Geneva Peace Conference to try to find a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

1992 – The Assembly of the Serb People in Bosnia and Herzegovina proclaims the creation of Republika Srpska, a new state within Yugoslavia

2003 – Indian Ministry of External Affairs sponsors Pravasi Bharatiya Divas * to commemorate Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1915, and celebrate overseas Indian communities’ contributions to India’s development

2005 – The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the Government of Sudan sign the Comprehensive Peace Agreement to end the Second Sudanese Civil War

2006 – The Phantom of the Opera becomes the longest-running show in Broadway history, surpassing Cats, which ran for 7,485 performances

2007 – Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone at a Macworld keynote in San Francisco

2015 –Perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation. Elsewhere, a second hostage situation, related to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, occurs at a Jewish market, Hypercacher, in Vincennes. There are mass gatherings of solumn demonstrators in Paris and other cities around the world

2016 – First Law Enforcement Appreciation Day * sponsored by C.O.P.S.

______________________________________________

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About wordcloud9

Nona Blyth Cloud has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area for the past 45 years, spending much of that time commuting on the 405 Freeway. After Hollywood failed to appreciate her genius for acting and directing, she began a second career managing non-profits, from which she has retired.
Nona has now resumed writing whatever comes into her head, instead of reports and pleas for funding. She lives in a small house overrun by books with her wonderful husband and a bewildered Border Collie.